Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to sound processing, and more particularly, to sound processing based on a confidence measure.
Related Art
Auditory or hearing prostheses include, but are not limited to, hearing aids, middle ear implants, cochlear implants, auditory brainstem implants (ABI's), auditory mid-brain implants, optically stimulating implants, middle ear implants, direct acoustic cochlear stimulators, electro-acoustic devices and other devices providing acoustic, mechanical, optical, and/or electrical stimulation to an element of a recipient's ear. Such hearing prostheses receive an electrical input signal, and perform processing operations thereon so as to stimulate the recipient's ear. The input is typically obtained from a sound input element, such as a microphone, which receives an acoustic signal and provides the electrical signal as an output. For example, a conventional cochlear implant comprises a sound processor that processes the microphone signal and generates control signals, according to a pre-defined sound processing strategy. These control signals are utilized by stimulator circuitry to generate the stimulation signals that are delivered to the recipient via an implanted electrode array.
A common complaint of recipients of conventional hearing prostheses is that they have difficulty discerning a target or desired sound from ambient or background noise. At times, this inability to distinguish target and background sounds adversely affects a recipient's ability to understand speech.